A Guide to China’s ‘New Normal’ of Slogans and Clichés

China may have lost some of its manufacturing edge, but it’s still able to produce the stuff that counts. When it comes to the production of impressive political jargon and clichés, it hasn’t lost its touch.

Take the handiwork of the Communist Party’s wordsmiths who have come up with the “new normal” (新常态) as a nifty way to describe China’s slower economic growth – without actually having to say just that. It emphasizes how everything is normal – no need to be alarmed -- even if there is a bit less money sloshing around. Eventually, there will be better-quality growth, too – though don’t ask when.

Slogans – unlike China’s economy – don’t suffer from overcapacity problems. There is always a market for more of them.

Hardly a day goes by without some reference to this “new normal” state of affairs. Much of the talk is from the nation’s most senior officials and then reverently repeated by those down below on the party’s food chain.

It fits nicely with another creation of the official phrase-makers: “top-down design” (顶层设计), a phrase that describes Beijing’s preference for giving out orders and handing down instructions, rather than letting the guys at the bottom figure things out for themselves.

Then there is the catchy phrase coined to describe what is sometimes labelled a New Silk Road, or a Chinese version of the Marshall Plan. It is an admittedly ambitious concept of helping other Asian countries put badly needed infrastructure in place – one that ultimately will also help China’s “new normal” economy as well.

The slogan mavens have come up with the catchy “One Belt and One Road” (一路一带) to describe this vision of trade and development that will benefit an entire region through infrastructure investments. Wags in Beijing suggest that “One Belt for the Road” might travel better – but that’s just their opinion.

And no one could forget the “China Dream” (中国梦), which is supposed to reflect a nation’s aspirations for spiritual rejuvenation that would ultimately carry China into the ranks of the wealthy and powerful. (Other competing dreams – like having a more robust legal system or a more inclusive political system -- are not necessarily part of the official vision.)

And then there is the term “negative list” (负面清单) – no, not just a government tally of correspondents that don’t get their visa renewed. The term was initially crafted to describe the freer trade rules governing the Shanghai Free Trade Zone and was widely billed as the first step in a more relaxed trading framework that one day would be applied nationwide.

The negative list was intended to suggest that anything that wasn’t specifically banned in the zone should be permitted. Unfortunately for the designers of the phrase, the list of negatives turned out to be so long they undermined the more liberal intentions of the policy. The negative list turned out to be positively disappointing.

And then there is the “decisive role of the market” (市场的决定性作用), which lately has been used to mean the market will finally be the determining factor in allocating the country’s precious resources – from oil to water and power to interest rates. But that takes us into the “Deep Water”( 深水区) of reform programs – the hard part, if you will. China is no longer at the shallow end, in which it could “Cross the River by Feeling the Stones” (摸着石头过河) as it could in the Deng Xiaoping era of reform.

Come to think of it, the new normal looks a little like the old normal.